🔎 What desertion is and why it matters:
Desertion—the unauthorized exit from an armed group—shapes counterinsurgency, war termination, and recruitment dynamics. While prior work emphasizes individual motives, organizational decline in the form of military and financial adversity can change how individual preferences translate into collective action.
🧠How the evidence was gathered and tested:
- Uses a multimethod approach focused on the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
- Quantitative analysis draws on a unique administrative dataset of more than 19,000 reported FARC deserters (2002–2017) provided by the Colombian Ministry of Defense.
- Statistical models address threats to causal inference and find that organizational decline increases desertion.
🗂️ What deserters reported and how it explains decline:
- A large body of detailed interview reports collected by Colombian military personnel serves as the qualitative evidence.
- These reports show that organizational decline weakens the group’s instruments for binding members: selective incentives, ideological appeal, and credible coercion.
- As these instruments lose force, individual desires increasingly determine behavior, raising the likelihood of desertion.
đź“Ś Key findings:
- Organizational decline—military setbacks and financial strain—predicts higher rates of desertion in the FARC across 2002–2017.
- Decline operates through three mechanisms: reduced selective incentives, eroded group ideology, and a weakened coercive regime.
- Qualitative interview evidence corroborates the statistical results and illustrates how these mechanisms play out on the ground.
🔍 Why this matters for policy and theory:
- Understanding organizational decline reframes desertion not only as an individual choice but as a structural response to failing group capacity.
- Desertion can accelerate conflict termination but also create conditions for renewed recruitment, so counterinsurgency and peace strategies must account for how weakening organizations reshape both incentives and risks.
